1 Chapter 11 Casting the Role of Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace a Gift for an Actor Few Indeed Are the Surviving Ancient Greek

Chapter 11 Casting the Role of Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace A Gift for an Actor Few indeed are the surviving ancient Greek dramas where the name of the leading actor who first realised the protagonist’s role is known to us. The earliest example is almost certainly that of Apollodorus, the comic actor who in 421 BC first played Trygaeus, the leading part in Aristophanes’ Peace. This is recorded, along with the information that the play was beaten into second place by Eupolis’ Flatterer (Kolax), in a single transmitted source: the third of the four ancient hypotheses to Peace which have been preserved in the learned codex Venetus Marcianus 474 (line 441). Some might not regard the information either as one hundred per cent reliable or as remotely important.1 But provisionally bestowing the name Apollodorus on the actor who first played Trygaeus might encourage us to reconstruct concretely the way the splendid role was brought to life. Vinegrower and lunatic, saviour and trickster, beetle rider, aerial adventurer, cosmic diplomat, and bridegroom – Trygaeus is all of these. He is also a substitute for Nicias and a congener of Dionysus. This chapter argues that his role represents the art of socially useful comedy; as such it includes, within the comic role, a fascinating range not only of theatrical roles (including Bellerophon and Silenus), but of poetic genres, forms, metres, quotations and styles of vocal delivery. This certainly would have been a fitting role for an actor whose name meant ‘gift of Apollo’, gift of the divine president of Helicon. Although ‘pacifist’ is an unhelpful term in discussing Aristophanes, if 1 only because it arose in the late 19th century in order to designate a political principle incomprehensible to the fifth-century mindset,2 Trygaeus is undoubtedly an advocate of peace. He is an example of ancient pagan creativity in response to the need for positive cultural expressions of that desirable circumstance. This contrasts with the dearth of pacific imagery in the western post-Renaissance cultural encyclopaedia, lamented, for example, by Marina Warner in reaction to the American bombing of Libya in 1986: with the exception of the Old Testament’s symbolic iconography of the dove and the olive twig, most western monuments to peace, like the Cenotaph in London, only define it passively and negatively. The idea of peace ‘seems difficult to seize without referring to the absence of war, and thus making war present as a standard’.3 But from as early as the pastoral imagery in Homeric similes,4 the town at peace on Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, and the depiction of peasant farming in Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Greeks enjoyed a rich repertoire of images for the activities of peace-time.5 A favoured theme of choral lyric, in a paean by Bacchylides (fr. 4.61-80 Snell-Maehler) Peace was described as bringing wealth, songs, festivals, and sacrifices; in tragedy, Euripides had made the chorus of his Cresphontes praise Peace, who brings in her train wealth, songs, and revelry ((39) Eur. fr. 453 TgrF). Comedy took up the theme enthusiastically. In Aristophanes’ Farmers of 424 BC, the activities of peace-time included a bath, a good meal, and drinking of the new vintage.6 In the subsequent version of his Peace, Aristophanes presented his audience with a dialogue between Eirene and Georgia, the personification of agriculture (fr. 294 K-A).7 In the surviving version, the core symbol of peace is viticulture, as inherently Dionysiac as theatre itself: an Attic red-figure kalyx-krater which may well have been 2 influenced by the play, and which dates from the decade following it, depicts a blissful nocturnal scene with Dionysus attended by Himeros, a satyr named ‘Sweet-Wine’ or ‘Wine-Enjoyer’ (Hēduoinos), and maenads including Opōra, Dione, and a recumbent Eirene, torch and drinking horn in hand.8 But in Peace the battle for peace is more verbally sophisticated than its equation with grape-harvesting might imply; it is formulated as a battle between literary genres, with heroic epic identified as the enemy. Even Ionian iambos and Aesopic fable are, within the opening sequence, enrolled in the service of Trygaeus’ mission.9 If art is to be understood as a product of a particular society at a particular time, criticism must involve ‘illuminating some of the ways in which various forms, genres, and styles…come to have value ascribed to them by certain groups in particular contexts'.10 Perhaps it is a modern failure to understand the idea of peace as an activity which led to Peace suffering worse twentieth-century scholarly neglect than most of Aristophanes’ works,11 for other times and other places had estimated it differently. After the Renaissance rediscovery of Greek drama, Peace was spectacularly performed at Trinity College, Cambridge, as early as 1546.12 The play probably lies behind the figure of Irene, borne aloft in the procession at the coronation of James I, ‘her attire white, semined with stares, her hair loose’, even though she also carried the Judaeo-Christian dove and olive wreath.13 A recent study by Michelakis has shown how Peace was staged at painfully appropriate moments in twentieth-century history; in Greece in 1919, Switzerland in 1945, and in a Parisian adaptation during the Algerian war (1961).14 It was influentially directed by Peter Hacks in East Berlin to denounce the Cold War (1962), a production subsequently revived more than once in that tense city: the final scene featured Trygaeus teaching a 3 Friedenslied to a young neo-fascist paramilitary.15 Trygaeus has also enjoyed a certain popularity in France, where he has traditionally been called ‘Lavendange’, and has been identified as the ancestor of famous French roles including Molière’s con-man Scapin, and valet Sganarelle in Don Juan; Aristophanes has been seen as a forerunner of indigenous French writers – Rabelais, Voltaire, and Giradoux – in having advocated peace in a comic medium.16 In academic circles, until very recently, Trygaeus was nevertheless sidelined in comparison with most heroes of Old Comedy. Yet his opening stunt, in which he rises into the air on the back of a giant dung-beetle, is the most fantastic in Aristophanes.17 His mount is truly ‘carnivalesque’, a riotous combination of the tragic with the scatological.18 The stunt is more extended and arduous than many scholars have appreciated. Trygaeus appears, rising on the beetle, at approximately lines 80-1 (meteōros airetai), and plunges into an agitated anapaestic sequence, which implies that the beetle is either resisting being steered, or that the actor tried to convey that impression. What a challenge this presented to Apollodorus can only be appreciated by an imaginative exercise. Without even considering the fact that Trygaeus is involved in an elaborate parody of tragic diction, music, and acting style, he is swaying around astride ‘a counter-weighted beam balanced on a pole slightly higher than the central portion of the skene’, a beam which probably required a crew of several men to move it vertically or pivot it around its fulcrum.19 Moreover, the text implies that Trygaeus actually remains suspended in mid-air throughout the entire sequence 82-179, which makes it by far the longest crane scene in fifth-century drama.20 Even if he alights at 102, and delivers the paratragic iambic dialogue with his slave and his daughters from the roof, he must remount his malodorous steed once again at 4 154, and resume his hazardous ascent reciting anapaests derived from Euripides’ Bellerophon.21 And hazardous it is: not only does he become distracted, pointing out an individual in a latrine far away in the Piraeus (164- 5), but something goes wrong with the operation of the crane. The beetle starts nose-diving at 158, and Trygaeus is rocked so hard that his body becomes bent double at 173-5, requiring the actor to break all dramatic illusion and tell the crane operator to pay better attention.22 Apollodorus must have been relieved when he discovered that his descent to earth did not require him to remount (725-6). Peasant and Saviour Trygaeus shares with other Aristophanic heroes his Athenian citizenship. Yet he is less urban and more exclusively associated with the countryside even than his nearest parallel, Dicaeopolis. As he informs Hermes, he is a peasant from Athmonon, a skilled vine-grower, and a man who usually avoids conflict (190-1). His extra-mural deme, which lay far north-east from the city centre at the foot of Mount Pentelikon, was no doubt chosen because of its excellent vines;23 it may also already have housed the cult of Aphrodite Ourania that was reputed, in Pausanias' day, to have been of extreme antiquity (1.14.7),24 and the play associates peace with renewed erotic opportunities (884-908).25 Trygaeus knows and loves the farming business: he is well-versed in the prices of honey (253-4). His own raven fig-tree cut down by Spartans marauding in Attica (628-9), cutting short his rural idyll (569-81). But he is a householder with responsibilities, just prosperous enough to own two slaves (181). He has hungry daughters (115-53), but must be a single parent; his freedom to marry Opōra at the end of the play suggests that he is a widower. 5 As an opponent of war Trygaeus resembles Dicaeopolis and Lysistrata.26 After the successful recovery of Peace, he is hailed as a paradigmatic good citizen (politēs, 911-14), and even in the language of encomia as ‘saviour’ (914, see also 1035-6, an epithet primarily of Zeus).27 But he is exceptional amongst Aristophanic heroes in that he represents the whole of the assembled city, inviting identification with virtually all Athenians present.

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